Thanks for posting this, it's extremely interesting. I subjected it to my "instant reading" technique and will now make comments on things as I read them without knowing the entire text until the end.
Well, who is to say that composers don't improvise as they go along? Boulez' Improvisation sur Mallarme is a kind of improvisation in the sense that it did not receive the same amount of reflection he would normally apply to a composition. There is a gradient of "spontaneity" along which the cited works lie, and ironically the early work of Steve Reich is the least spontaneous -- in fact, spontaneity wouldn't make any sense there, otherwise the qualitative shifts in the music would not be possible. I don't see clearly how the Ferneyhough example(s) fit into this spectrum. Do the performers spontaneously decide which demands of the score are possible to meet in the immediate performance circumstances?

Is this speculative? I thought it was self-evident. Why "perhaps"?

...but only in certain highly ideological circles.

Well, the composer can only encourage emotional involvement, they can't force it, and certainly not by making their music more emotionally engaging in some artificial fashion.

So it should be questioned! Is someone doing the actual work of questioning it?

So each improvisation that starts off "cold" necessarily begins with a warm-up period, similar in function to an "exposition", I suppose, and the time of right-brain dominance takes on the role of the "development". While one doesn't expect a "recap", this emergent form seems to suggest the need for a "denouement" of some sort. Is an "instant composing" session possible that begins with development? How about if you improvise silently for a few minutes (e.g., in a sound-proof room) and then suddenly open the doors when your EEG registers a lot of right-brain activity? That would be very interesting indeed!

"loose and heuristic" is a good description of "developmental procedure" in the most successful models of 18th- and 19th-century classical form. It is precisely the rigidness and apriori definition that distinguishes early Reich as "new music".

This and the ensuing description is very interesting, but it is unclear how improvised music can subject the initial phrases to any greater degree of differentiation that notated music could. The type of evolution described would in both cases lead down the occasional Holzweg, but the composer has an eraser, while the improviser has to accept the Holzwege as errors, or more likely, stylistic and formal "features" that need not mar the experience.

I completely agree with this. Music that doesn't go beyond the mundane is lamentable.

I look forward to hearing it when it's ready... wait a minute... 1992?! You mean I missed it?

I am very supportive of the ideas suggested in this essay, but the point I am trying to make is that improvisers and composers need to learn from each other -- I know I have a lot to learn from improvisers. But each does some things that are impossible for the other, and developing concepts that make the best of both worlds is still extremely rare and difficult to do.

Nevertheless, when as a performer one learns a notated score so well that one feels one has composed it, and can empathize with all of the composer's decisions, things are possible that no improvisational situation will ever equal. That level of involvement is rare in new music, especially the more complex stuff... This does not diminish the point that composers can learn from improvisers and shouldn't dismiss their work as inferior or lazy -- improvisation, or instant composition: it's simply a different goose, and makes a unique gaggle of contributions.

All my comments are independent of whether or not I find the essay convincing (which in fact I do).

Thanks for those comments, CD, they are very interesting. As is the essay - but I just wish he and other improvisers might stop always having to define themselves against a straw man idea of what notated music entails. This idea, which seems implicit in what he writes, that specificity in notation simply acts as a constraint upon the performer's creative imagination and the field of 'legitimate interpretation' (I would like to bet that in comparative performances/recordings of Ferneyhough's La chute d'Icare, say, there's every bit as much if not more variety of interpretation and conception from the performers compared to performances of more standard repertoire; also the subculture of improvisation makes its own demands and places its own constraints upon what is possible, something Parker is not free from), is extremely simplistic, let alone his comments on emotional involvement. His view of notation is very pedestrian indeed. But I've heard these platitudes repeated parrot-fashion by many improvisers - this endless need to justify the merits of their activity mostly on grounds of it being 'not notated music', rather than in terms of the actually-existing results, actually becomes a bit sad after a while.

Why have improvisers got such a chip on their shoulder about notated music? After all, the former seem on the whole to produce more CDs on average.

"In testing my limits of duration I worked on two techniques which have given a particular character to what I now feel free to call my style. Using an up/down motion of the tongue, rather than the standard technique of tu-ku using throat attack, I developed a double tonguing which was faster and more flexible and capable of use over a wider dynamic range. This technique made rapid successions of notes of very short durations possible. I think I hear this technique in the music of Charlie Parker, Pharaoh Saunders, Wayne Shorter and Jan Garbarek. To extend durations beyond a breath length I worked on circular breathing technique in which a small reserve of air in the cheeks is pushed through the instrument while the diaphragm is used to breath in through the nose."

All of this is very nice, but...

...the last time I saw Lol Coxhill he ws improvising with someone doing a poetry reading - as it turned out in the course of this partic improvisation the reading ws overwhelming the playing - it was hilarious at points, pretty funny at least, powerful enough for the audience to get very into it and maybe not so much into the playing...and so Lol stopped playing. For the next 15 mins or so he stayed in his seat but never played another note - at first this ws surprising, but it proved to be the correct thing to do. 

This is a very specific species of surprise that improv has. But I doubt Evan could ever contemplate not playing, AT ALL, if the situation required.

It would be fascinating to explore it experimentally and I don't know whether anyone has or not. I'd be fairly sure though that you couldn't begin to tell by 'introspection' that is what is happening. As I understand it, music-making and music-listening isn't particularly localised in the brain but at all times requires an array of disparate functions that are located all over the brain, right and left hemispheres. That isn't to say that the dominant activity might change over time but I'm just a bit sceptical about the activity transferring, as it were, from one hemisphere to the other. But as you say, it would be great to find out and not that difficult.

There's a review article here that sums up some of the (more general) findings on what bits of the brain seem to be doing what in terms of 'processing' music: http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/full/96/6/284  The bit about Ravel and Bolero strikes me as a tad on the reductionist side to say the least but presumably it's the briefest summing up of something more complex. [Oh, I see there is a link to a footnote from someone complaining about just that.]

It would be sad if he didn't gain depth and nuance with time, but alas it's equally common for people to gain entrenchment and curmudgeonry with time. The only antidote is hard work and constant soul-searching... but I'm interested in the nature of that depth and nuance.

Let me investigate one aspect of his work, as alluded to in the essay: I am familiar with that overtone thingy he does, from two trio albums with Paul Bley and Barrph Illips, and from a duo album with Anthony Braxton (which right now needs to be addressed in the "Where is it???" thread!!! Bugger!) I do see this stylistic/technical feature as becoming technically more and more 'domesticated' as it were, as he gains control of it. It is always in danger of becoming a schtick, though.

I imagine that it would have been absolute magic in the context of that sculpture exhibit, since it seems ideally suited for dialogue with drones. That is because the drones suggest a harmonic context, even if a shifting one, and I think the technique needs exactly that kind of dialogue partner in order to avoid being like a stage prop. I can imagine other such dialogue partners, i.e., a rhythm framework, but in any case it does scream for something to push against.

In the trio album "Time will tell," which is one of my great favorite recordings ever, this overtone thingy is primarily differentiated by dynamic, and by the fact that Bley and 'ph Illips are fantastic about trying to comment on the effect in their own way (they clearly are physically incapable of producing something analogous, but what they do do is very engaging indeed and gives the effect some much-needed anchoring.

In the trio album "St. Gerold", the second or third track is just 5 minutes of the thingy, circularly breathed, and it's at once breathtakingly impressive, intimidating, and like a big lump of potato in the pit of the listening stomach. That is, once it is over, you wonder what it was for other than to suggest an acoustic "rinse cycle." Plus the acoustic at the monastery (church? brothel? gazebo?) does him no favors by imparting an air of sacrality.

In the duo album with Braxton (Where the bloody h*ll is it???), the thingy takes on an entirely new dimension by Braxton himself actually making the same sorts of sounds. One gets a weird sense that the technique is differently hampered by the very different technical limitations of the two performers. An intriguing possibility. However, I am still waiting to hear a context in which the thingy is emancipated from its "Wowee" character and takes on some kind of poetic rather than totemic dimension.

So I still have lots of room to grow... attached to it, that is. Suggestions welcome!

I will post the two tracks from the trio albums sometime later... but the duo album I most distressingly cannot find, so perhaps someone else will oblige. See you in sendspace!

Sure, it ws playing with a poet but I put that fwd as an extreme example to demonstrate what improv can open up, quite apart from any issue of whether its composition or not, or whether there is more 'freedom'. But Evan has always struck me as someone who is really reluctant to take apart his playing to interact with other improvisers the way that someone like Lol or John Butcher have done. The fact he played 20% of the time could just be (having not heard that recording) just Evan waiting for others to get through their solos (of course it probably isn't that, so I won't speculate anymore).

RB - Know you've played with him and all, but most of the time I've heard EP my ears get the suspicion that its been really hard work to get him out of his shell...a species of free jazz player like Abe or Arthur Doyle, who just doesn't do enough give and take for my ears. I like some of the results coming from this, like in those Abe duets with Takayanagi where they sounded fairly disengaged to downright antagonistic toward each other and yet somehow it appeared to come off on stage. (x-posts)

The trio with Bley and Phillips generally shows EP in a more lyrical mode than otherwise. The multilayered soprano texture comes into its own on his solo recordings (among which I'd name Lines burnt in light, Conic Sections and the partly multitracked Process and Reality as particularly interesting examples - the first two consist of more extended and consistent pieces, the third mostly of short "etudes" focusing on different techniques or textures), but it also highlights another way in which improvisation differs (from the listener's point of view) from performing precomposed music: the fact that the former can be much more fundamentally conditioned by the performing circumstances, so that, for example, performing in a resonant space might bring forth a quite different kind of music from performing in a dry one. This dimension, which is clear to both performer(s) and listeners at the point of performance, is somewhat obscured in a recording (although there are some notable exceptions like Stuart Dempster's In The Great Abbey of Clement VI where the space is so resonant that Dempster can use it as a "delay system").

As for schtick, my experience with EP's solos in live performance (which can last half an hour or more) is that at the outset I'm thinking to myself "here we are on familiar territory, though I do like it", then, later on (with the other half of my and/or his brain?), I'm thinking "no, this is actually exploring different areas of this "musical space" from the ones I've heard before", and then, eventually, I'm not thinking anything outside my concentration on the sound and its unfolding.

Returning to Sankt Gerold, after first hearing it I remarked on its acoustic qualities to Evan who replied that actually the original recording didn't sound anything like that (nor was it played in anything like the same order) and had been made to sound "sacral" by the studio people back at ECM. (I much prefer Time Will Tell myself.) I don't know the EP/Braxton duo, but EP's duo record with Borah Bergman, The Fire Tale, is also concerned with two voices moving in a kind of quasi-parallel at high velocity, which one also hears passim in Nailed (EP, Cecil Taylor, Barry Guy, Tony Oxley).

Otherwise, I'm not too clear on what you mean in distinguishing between "totemic" and "poetic" dimensions in this context.